This week's featured cookbook is Food DIY by Tim Hayward, a guide to 'making
your own everything'.

The kitchen was full of teenagers; the sun blazed down outside and Food DIY lay on the table. Putting two and two together, the teens lugged the book outside and, directed by Mr Hayward’s empowering, can-do attitude, dug themselves a pit, lined it with bricks and cement, and lit a fire. Twelve hours later, they had enough pulled pork to feed 34.

Impressive; and so is Food DIY, or 'how to make your own everything, from bacon, pickled herrings and biltong to sourdough, potted lobster and preserved figs’. You have to get used to Hayward’s 'man-up at the back, no whingeing’ tone, but if you can cope with that, it won’t be long before you’re smoking, baking and preserving as though the modern world had never happened.

You can sit down with a plate of salad with lardons after you’ve built a smoke chamber and left your bacon in it for eight hours.

Cut the bacon into small batons. Try to include both fat and meat in each piece. Fry them briskly in a dry pan. Remove from the heat and scatter the lardons over the leaves. Add the red wine vinegar to the pan, stir, then pour over the salad.